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The Elephant Catchers – Subroto Bagchi

To begin with, I am highly thankful to Subroto Bagchi for writing a book like this. I have already read this book thrice within a span of 2 weeks and planning to read it again and again. Simple language, effective & sensible solutions to problems and more importantly telling what will work or what won’t in the best possible way is what impressed me the most about The Elephant Catchers. The reason I read this book thrice because the organisation where I am currently work is scaling up and I have been given responsibilities to do that and put things in order. For me, the time of arrival of this book on my shelf couldn’t have been any better. Also, thanks to the publishers for sending me a review copy of this book.

The Elephant Catchers is divided into six parts, each focussing on extremely important parts of scaling. The first part of the book deals with “The Idea Of Scale”. The author successfully managed to plant the seed of scaling up in my mind through various examples and situations. Subroto has shared his experiences with his company Mindtree on almost every juncture of the book and has been extremely candid with everything. He has openly accepted where he and his team went wrong and the measures taken by them to correct its aftereffects.

In the second part of the book, Subroto talks about scaling up the business specially focussing on Mergers & Acquisitions, Joint Ventures, valuing and evaluation of everything related to scaling. The points raised by him for the M&A convinced me up to an extent that I discussed this entire chapter with my boss and made him understand the pros and cons of it.

Scaling your intellect, the third part of the book is what I am currently doing in my organisation. Hiring people, hiring consultants, putting right people on board and letting the non-performers go is what has been discussed in this part of the book and if you look at it from a broader perspective, you will realise that what he is saying actually makes sense. There are witty one liners used by the author particularly in this section which will solve a very complex equation for you in a few seconds.

Scaling your reputation, scaling your people, according to me are the most important sections of this book. One needs to understand that an organisation is run by its people and a successful organisation is the one where its people are happy. Subroto discusses about branding, how Mindtree was rebranded, the thought process and the activities behind the whole process of rebranding Mindtree has been discussed here. When it comes to scaling people, all the six chapters under this section are eye-openers in a way.

Scaling against adversity, the last section of the book, I wish this particular section was more elaborate in terms of examples and situations, but no complaints there. Overall, the book for me has been a boon. I have already recommended this book to a lot of people and through this space as well, I strongly recommend this book to all the entrepreneurs who have this vision to take their businesses to the next level. Subroto Bagchi has given you a guidebook which will help you in almost each step of this process of scaling up.